Every purchase you make through these Amazon links supports DVD Verdict's reviewing efforts. Thank you!

All Rise...

Appellate Judge Tom Becker wants a re-test.

The Charge

There are no multiple choices.

The Case

It's Any Rural High USA, and the geeky kids are consistently bullied by the
good-looking, popular crowd. But now, the geeks have planned revenge. Inspired
by their love of horror movies, they've surreptitiously planned a costume party
and invited all their attractive tormentors. The bullies are too stupid and
self-absorbed to find out exactly who's throwing the bash, so they dress up like
hot cops (the girls) and hunky gladiators (the boys) and descend on an
out-of-the-way farmhouse, never dreaming that the masked strangers ladling out
laced punch are actually the objects of their scorn and derision.

Nor do the jocks and princesses realize that all the abuse they've spent
years dishing out is about to hit them squarely—and literally—in
their pretty faces.

Geek vengeance is such a staple of horror movies that I've lost count of how
many times I've seen a cool kid getting the business end of a sharp object as
penance for unkind behavior. The Final takes this hackneyed conceit and
adds an ugly twist: rather than the usual monster-in-a-mask shenanigans in which
unruly youths are hunted and slaughtered, the geeks here don't have murder on
their minds.

Instead, these mice are going to roar by crippling and disfiguring the
bullies and letting them live. Faces are burned off, fingers amputated, a spinal
cord severed, and the head geek makes long-winded speeches about retribution
while the victimizers-turned-victims whimper, cower, and beg. While all this
makes The Final different from the average slasher/vengeance movie, it
doesn't necessarily make it better.

The Final is a profoundly unpleasant film that ends up being far more
depressing than exciting. Sure, the bullies are nasty—as is the wont of
bullies—but do they deserve to be hideously scarred for life because they
pantsed some kid in the ninth grade? The long, drawn-out scenes of methodical
mutilation are just horrifying, and once things get going, we naturally
sympathize with the kids we were set up to dislike. As far as bullies go, this
bunch is relatively benign; they're mean, haughty, and bigoted (at least toward
a kid from India), but they're not setting people on fire or dropping pigs blood
on anyone like the great bullies of yesteryear.

There's a silly, if slightly shameful, visceral thrill to watching a
(usually superhuman) killer decimate a bunch of kids at a summer camp or on a
train or at a prom, or wherever. We've signed on for the kills and thrills, and
we're not there to sympathize, empathize, or consider long-range consequences
(Muffy's parents will be so sad that their daughter's impaled on a pitchfork!).
It's so over the top that it only exists in that moment.

Watching a pretty girl have her face slowly eaten away by acid is not fun.
There's no horror movie "kick" in watching kids have their fingers cut
off while they're begging for mercy. Long speeches about how the bullies deserve
to have their lives ruined because they weren't nice to the geeks are poor
substitutes for the classic "chase through the woods" or "hide in
a closet" moments that are the lifeblood of horror films. These speeches
also don't make any more palatable the disgusting and unsettling business
happening on screen.

The film takes itself very seriously. There's no humor here, nor is there
any sex, and there isn't any kind of mystery or puzzle involved, like the Saw family. This is really more of a crime film
than a horror movie.

The Final is one of the After Dark Horrorfest's "8 Films to Die
For." A couple of years ago, I reviewed another Horrorfest offering, Borderland, which was also more
or less a crime drama and based on real events, as The Final purports to
be. The difference is that while Borderland had a compelling story to
tell, The Final doesn't really have much to say at all.

We all know how miserable it is to be a high school outcast, and here and
there, the film tosses us the kind of generalized justifications you hear in
discussions of school violence (the influence of horror movies, the chance to be
Internet sensations). The adults who should be monitoring these kids are always
shown either from the waist down or with their backs to the camera, driving home
the point of how directionless these teens are. But there's no real
follow-through on these ideas.

Instead, we wind up with the usual stupid horror conventions, including
boneheaded decisions on the part of the victims and a tied up guy screaming,
"I'm not afraid of you!" after he's witnessed his friends having their
faces burned off. Also, the cool kids and jocks are strikingly passive; they're
in chains, but have enough freedom of movement that when someone points a sharp
object at them, they should at least be able to try to push it away or even grab
one of their tormentors and try to turn the tables. The outcasts' plan is also
fairly elaborate, involving a conveniently abandoned and isolated house, a
sophisticated knowledge of anatomy and chemistry, and the good fortune that
everyone will consume glasses of spiked-with-a-sleep-aid punch at exactly same
the moment, that the drug will effect everyone at around the same moment, that
no one will catch on when they see their friends collapsing around them and try
to escape or call for help.

If the vengeance had taken the form of inflicting less permanent
damage—a little humiliation, a couple of broken bones, that sort of
thing—this might have worked. Instead, director Joey Stewart and writer
Jason Kabolati bookend their story with scenes of one of the formerly pretty and
now disfigured girls being stared at, pitifully, at a burger joint. We feel sad
for her, and in another movie, she might be the main character and this story
about how her life has changed after being scarred. Instead, this is played like
the typical horror end scene, for shock value, but along with a few other end
scenes showing how lives have been ruined (including the geeks), you walk away
with a sense of despair.

I'm generally not a big fan of commentaries, particularly for recent films.
While tracks done for classics can offer up trivia, analysis, and context, newer
films usually give us people jabbering about minutia that was interesting if you
were there ("Remember how hard it was to get that shot?") but not so
compelling to listen to ("And wasn't he great to work with?"). As a
rule, they neither add to nor detract from the viewing experience.

The commentary for The Final, with Stewart and Kabolati, is a rarity
in that it actually made me like the film less than I already did. Besides the
backslapping, they relentlessly point out the obvious—like we need to have
geek misery dissected even more than it's presented on screen—and, since
this is a high school revenge movie, naturally they invoke Columbine and other
such tragedies. Given how disturbing and sour this film is, I really thought
that maybe they were trying to make some larger statement, but all their inane
chatter about how scary this is supposed to be, along with the constant
referencing to other, superior films ("Here's our homage to No Country for Old Men")
suggested otherwise. At one point, they explain—like they needed
to—that a teacher's lecture on an ancient civilization in which enemies
were disfigured but kept alive rather than killed serves as the inspiration for
the geeks' plan; they might have also mentioned contemporary atrocities such as
thuggish fanatics in Afghanistan throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls to
dissuade women from seeking an education.

But I guess that would take all the "fun" out of this
torturesploitation mess.

The other supplements are a useless "Behind the Scenes" number
that tosses in a few random quotes for the actors but mainly gives us outtakes,
and a couple of trailers. The image is solid and the audio strong.

The Verdict

Well made, but a nasty piece of work. I can't call it bad, but I can't
recommend it, either.